[kbelder]

"How many people came to our contact page, but left without calling the hotline?"

"Don't know, boss. We'd need to add analytics."

"Like what?"

"Google Analytics? It's free and pretty much universal."

"Ok, do it."

It's just standard. Not great, and Google uses the data in all sorts of ways that they don't make obvious. But it's not a cabal of evil website owners selling data to tech giants. They're just trying to run their websites and they're using industry standard, free services to do so. It doesn't cross their mind that they're helping google build individual profiles to sell targeted ads.

I'd love for self-hosted analytics to really get a foothold, not just for the increased privacy, but also because all the tech giants cripple your access to the data they collect off your own site.

[bondarchuk]

Almost noone is really "evil" in this stereotypical way, it is a thoroughly unhelpful way to view these things, it's more like criminal negligence that people who work for the government to handle medical data still don't know or don't care that google analytics sends data to google after 20 years of google analytics existing, and that the government as a whole does not have systems in place to enforce data privacy and hold people accountable who violate it.

[Frieren]

> industry standard

Some time more than 10 years ago, industry standard moved away form Linux, Apache, open source, etc. to big-tech. Many developers attending conferences cannot differentiate propaganda (Facebook connected, Google I/O, etc.) from a technical presentation . And they moved all their stack to software and hardware that is not under their control. A total failure of engineering but a big win for shareholders.

[gtowey]

At some point we have to get used to the idea that there are no such thing as free services. If you're not paying for something that clearly has a cost to the entity providing it, then value will be extracted from you in other ways.

[autoexec]

> If you're not paying for something that clearly has a cost to the entity providing it, then value will be extracted from you in other ways.

Then we should get used to the idea that even when you're paying a lot of money for something the entity taking your money will still do everything and anything to extract even more value from you including collecting and selling your data, remotely disabling features of the thing you paid for so they can start charging you a monthly fee to get them back, aggressively infesting the product with ads, pushing updates that degrade the service to incentivize you to upgrade, etc.

The greed of companies and their shareholders will never be satisfied so ultimately what we need are real consumer protections in the form of powerful regulation and enforcement.

[gtowey]

I agree. I'm not defending the current state of affairs by any means.

[like_any_other]

Paying the danegeld logic. They are more than happy to charge you money and spy on you. See Windows 11, Bambu printers making every print go through their cloud, smart TVs reporting on what you watch, cars tattling on where you're driving, and countless other examples.

[dfxm12]

This is true, but it's important to note that this will still likely happen for services you are paying for, too.

[piyuv]

Do you realize this thread is about a suicide preventation website? Can’t you separate between public services and profit-based ones?

[BobaFloutist]

I think the best-faith assumption was they were taking about the use of Google analytics. For the suicide prevention website, the value is the benefit to society of you not killing yourself.